


Inheritances

by Siria



Series: Not in Kansas [3]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fusion, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-02-11
Updated: 2007-02-11
Packaged: 2017-10-03 19:38:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, late at night or early in the morning, Rodney asks John about his home, where he's from.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inheritances

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Eliza.

Sometimes, late at night or early in the morning, Rodney asks John about his home, where he's from. John tells him of a red-painted farmhouse on flat green farmland; a house filled with sunlight, with all the love that two elderly parents could lavish on the son they thought they'd never have. He tells Rodney about the skies over Kansas, vast and blue, where he first slipped free of gravity, where he first knew he was truly different. He tells him about Spring Break and farmyard chores; sunsets so pure that they seemed to set the prairie and the cornfields ablaze.

Sometimes, Rodney pushes a little further, asks him where he's really from, journalist's instincts combining with pure curiosity. "You must know," he says. "Something, anything. You know about Altaira. You know your—you know what your name would have been."

But John can't tell him anything more, and over the years, Rodney comes to accept that he's telling the truth; that in this matter, he's not speaking because he won't, but because he knows nothing more than what an alien hologram once told Martha Sheppard when he was still a baby—his real name; his home planet; that all his people are dead; that his birth parents loved him more than they could say.

"Don't really want to know, anyway," John tells him one night. He's half asleep and drowsing against Rodney's shoulder, still smelling of gun powder and wood smoke from another night's patrol. "Not my home. S'not here."

* * *

John's mother sends him a card one Thursday to celebrate the third anniversary of his starting work at the Planet; by Saturday morning, she's dead.

"It was a stroke," the doctor tells John kindly, gently, when they get there from Metropolis, John breaking every speed limit on the way down there because Rodney insisted that they take the car. "It was quick and painless—she simply never woke up. There was nothing anyone could have done."

"Not humanly possible, huh?" John says flatly, but Rodney can hear the undercurrent of bitterness, the self-reproach.

"John," he says, "No," slipping his hand into John's, leading him away from the hospital and its clean, antiseptic smell, back to the house that John still thinks of as home, mostly.

They take the week off after the funeral—they've both got a lot of holiday time accrued, and Elizabeth is nothing if not compassionate—and they alternate between being quiet together, and sorting through the contents of the farmhouse together, the detritus of a hundred years of family, of John Sheppards begetting John Sheppards, until there was Rodney's John.

John doesn't say much, even then; but Rodney has learned to break through John's walls in different ways now, more permanent ones, has learned how silence, for John, can be the loudest thing of all; and he sits cross-legged next to him on the floor, and waits until John wants to tell him about the photos he's sorting through, the boxes of old toys, the clothing he's dividing up to give to charity.

On the fifth day, John finds the key to the storm cellar, and takes Rodney down to show him where he used to hide as a kid, the warm corner near the furnace where he would hide away, curled in a nest of blankets, with a book or a model airplane kit. It's still warm down there, but cramped, and Rodney complains when he nearly hits his head on the low ceiling, when he bangs his shin against a stack of boxes.  
"Smaller than I remembered," John says, picking absentmindedly through a box of old sports gear—a worn baseball glove; two footballs, one deflating softly—but he looks up when Rodney frowns and pokes at the wall and says, "Yes, well, partitions will do that to a room."

"What partition?"

"See how the wall is hollow here?" Rodney says, rapping his knuckles against it—and yes, John can hear it—before gesturing up at the ceiling. "Plus, this should probably run the full length of the kitchen, but it's at least, oh, fifteen feet too short. Too much space to be accounted for by extra-thick foundations."

John moves up to stand next to Rodney, running his hand down the rough-plastered length of the wall. There is _something_ behind it, faint and indefinable, but John can feel it. He stares at the wall, letting his eyes lose focus until he's seeing nothing, until he's seeing _through_, and—oh.

"Stand back," he says, and Rodney takes a couple of hurried steps backwards just before John aims a couple of punches at the wall, taking down what proves to be a flimsy plasterboard partition.

"Is that—" Rodney says, voice strange, when the dust clears and he can see it.

"Yes," John says, crouching down next to it—such a small thing, to have travelled so far, so fast—and running one hand over a scarred, blue-metal surface that still feels as cold as space. It lights up faintly beneath his touch, and there are crystals, John can see, embedded in the surface in between blocks of an unfamiliar script. "A one way ticket to Earth."

* * *

Later, when John has relearned the Altairan that he never knew he'd lost, and when Rodney has made sense of the inscriptions that line the walls of the ship, they take some more time off. John tells Elizabeth that they're going to Maui for a break, just the two of them, for a couple of weeks, and Elizabeth authorises the time off with a smile.

When Teyla comes to find Rodney, later, he tells her that he thought John needed it, had booked it as a surprise; she smiles at him broadly and hugs him, tells him that she thinks he is wise, for John has not quite been himself since his mother passed. Teyla returns to her work, a sheaf of printouts on the economies of Japan and half a dozen other Pacific Rim countries clutched in her hand; and Rodney sits there and stares at his computer screen and wonders how it is that three years with John have taught him to lie so easily to someone he loves.

John could probably tell him; John's spent his life keeping part of himself secret, locked it away with only a handful of words to centre himself around. Rodney considers this for a brief moment, then snorts to himself, and opens up a new Word document; he's not stupid enough to actually _ask_.

* * *

They book their plane tickets to Maui, but Rodney bundles up in cold-weather gear, and there is only the briefest of moments between John putting his arms around him in their apartment in Metropolis, and Rodney stepping out onto the crisp, hard-packed snow that coats the bottom of the world.

"It's not far, right?" Rodney says, because however impervious John might be to temperature, even through the impossibly fine material of his uniform, Rodney's not; images flash through his mind, Amundsen and Scott, and Rodney doesn't think he will ever be the type of guy who calmly announces that he's going outside and may be some time.

"Just over the hill," John says, already walking towards that low rise of land. He's not looking at Rodney, already drawn away by what he can sense lies near them, but he's got one hand wrapped warmly around Rodney's, so that Rodney can feel the heat flooding from John even through the thick material of his gloves. The air is pure and cold, so cold, but Rodney forgets the burning sensation in his lungs, the back of his calves, when they crest the hill and they see what has been calling to John for months now, maybe for years.

"Oh god," Rodney says, because even when he'd worked out what the inscriptions had meant, he could never have imagined something like this, "It's—it's _beautiful_."

Next to him, John takes a deep breath, but says nothing; just tilts his head back and back to look up at tall spires and clear glass, blue metal that glows softly the closer they get, crystals that look as if they sprang from the ice sheet around them but which are impossibly alien, impossibly old. There's a look on John's face that Rodney can't ever remember seeing before, and his chest aches to see it—happiness, a great sadness, something strangely like peace.

"Shall we?" Rodney says, as close to gentle as he can get, as close as life with John has ever made him.

And "yes," John says, distracted, his hand gripping Rodney's tight, "yes, home"; and they step forward together.


End file.
